Game News Age of Decadence November Update

[Wunderpurps]

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Internal tools are internal for a reason. They're intuitive to people who made them, but to a third party they could as well be written in Hindu.

Most mods do not actually use tools written (and upgradeable) by the modder himself. So there's a lot of guessing and experimentation involved, both mod- and engine-wise, which is a time-waster as far as getting "things to perform as intended" goes.

Most tools are written by programmers, not by the guy making content. They are also fully debugged and have shipped a game already before the modder even starts his work.

 

[shihonage]

Most tools are written by programmers, not by the guy making content.

Yet this guy is in tightest possible contact with the programmers when they're part of the same team.

They are also fully debugged and have shipped a game already before the modder even starts his work.

Fully debugged? Maybe in some cases. Accessible, however? This is where being close to the original devs and the game's systems is critical.

All I'm sayin' is that "some guy making mods for some stranger's game" is a far, far less efficient endeavor than "game dev team making its own content".

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Have you tried using DLTCEP+WeiDU combination?

 

[shihonage]

No, but I got the impression that it is listed in the dictionary under "nightmare".

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Weird. I have found it quite comfortable to use.

 

[SCO]

Weird. I have found it quite comfortable to use.

It depends of what you want to do. The game itself is quite open about modification of the rules/data it has implemented (since most data it uses is externalized in tables).

Woe betide you if you want to do something new with IE. But Weidu IS the best solution to modding the infinity engine for obvious reasons - it has a sane model of installation and uninstallation, and it's pretty general. I think it could be comfortably be used for modding another engine that hasn't a runtime plugin system if it could be adapted to deal with it's type of compressed files instead of IE's BIFFs (and the dialog part would be useless since that is IE specific).

You do need to know the game file formats backwards and forwards though (Weidu would be almost useless without IESDP).

I'm more interested in the reasons why Weidu mods are so many and modular and Bloodlines/ToEE mods are so few and monolithic (python is a 300 times better script language than dialogs in IE or bgscript). But because it's so much better, things actually got implemented more into the scripts and exe, and not enough into standardized external tables, and that might have made things harder to modularize.
Only recently a hacker managed to import maps into bloodlines while adding a map you have in BG is "just" adding some lines in file for a mod that does it for you (a mod for modders how about that). Or maybe it's not tools, just popularity.